The Amache Silk Screen Shop was a small screen-printing shop at the Granada War Relocation Center in Colorado, now Amache National Historic Site. Although some commercial industries existed at the ten World War II Japanese American incarceration centers, the Silk Screen Shop was the only self-sustaining and profitable printmaking facility.* 

The Shop opened on June 1, 1943, only 6 months after Amache opened, and the residents (mostly from Los Angeles, Sonoma County north of San Francisco, and California’s Central Valley) were brought by train from the temporary  detention centers at Santa Anita and Merced. The Silk Screen Shop produced materials for the Training Aid Division of the Navy Department Washington, D.C. (posters, charts and pamphlet covers) and materials for Amache's administrative units, and incarceree organizations and clubs.  

This website attempts to document all materials produced by the Shop during its two-year existence. Although the digital collection of the Silk Screen Shop products is large, there are many more prints out there! The Shop produced hundreds of objects for everyday use at Amache. Hopefully we can continue to grow this site in order to share, preserve, and appreciate the influence of the Amache Silk Screen Shop, highlighting the impact it made in the everyday lives of Amacheans and the vibrant visual record it leaves behind for us today.

*Heart Mountain's (WY) Poster Shop included screen printing, and they also had a contract with the US Navy, but transferred their equipment to Amache in early 1944.  The Print Shop at Poston (Colorado River, AZ) had a letterpress, but did not take on any outside contracts.

This website is produced by the Amache Alliance, a community organization dedicated to help preserve the WWII Granada Relocation Center (Amache) incarceration site and history in order to educate all Americans about the forced evacuation, relocation, and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. 

Funding for new photography of the objects was received from the Association of Print Scholars through their Collaboration Grant program. Although each object was made in multiples, only one representative example of each is reproduced; the credit line lists the owner of that specific object. We are grateful to the many institutions and individuals who have allowed us to reproduce their objects, particularly the Amache Museum of the Amache Preservation Society.